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Why Do We Dream?

      



   


    Dreams remain one of the most mysterious aspects of the human experience. Diviners, doctors and scientists have pondered the phenomenon of dreaming for centuries. Despite a plethora of competing theories that attempt to explain why we dream, no particular Idea has achieved a consensus among researchers.

   The classic exploration of dreams—the one that pop culture invokes time and time again is Freud’s, The Interpretion of Dreams published in 1899. The founding psychotherapist believed that dreams are our mechanism for living out our most aggressive, carnal desires—the urges that we’re not allowed to act on in real life—so that we don’t go insane from repressing them during the daytime. Though the field of psychoanalysis has largely moved on from Freud, our need to ascribe meaning to our dreams and to master our subconscious renders the Freudian approach compelling to this day.

    On the other hand, minimalist sleep researchers propose that dreams are devoid of any objective meaning. Harvard psychiatrists J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley generated a firestorm of controversy in 1977 when they argued that dreams are nothing but the side effects of spontaneous activity taking place in the synapses in the brain stem during sleep. In other words, our dreams (and the meanings that we ascribe to them) are nothing but our subjective attempt to reconcile those mental stimuli.

    In between these two extremes are a slew of theories that frame dreams as functionally, if not necessarily psychologically, important. Experiments show that dreams help subjects solve problems and puzzles that researchers posed to them before dream sleep. This finding jibes with theories that dreaming is crucial to memory storage, information processing, and cleaning out the synaptic garbage that the brain collects as a result of its normal operation. Other research indicates that dreams play an important role in stress relief, a theory supported by a decrease in stress hormones during dream sleep.

   Psychologist Deirdre Barrett, also of Harvard, focuses on our least favorite subset of dreams: nightmares. She claims that even these unwelcome dreams once posed the important evolutionary function of focusing attention on the dangers our ancestors faced in everyday life. All these functionalist hypotheses suggest that dreams developed as a function of the mammalian brain in order to fulfill an evolutionary purpose. What that purpose is remains a puzzle. Perhaps we should sleep on it?



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